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So this week I’ve been reading People Like Us, by Zichao Deng, an amusing, quasi-journal-style crime caper in which two criminally-inclined Englishmen in Brittany plot to relieve a nunnery of an unidentified, but evidently very valuable, artifact.

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So this week I’m reading — or rather, re-reading — The Golden Spiders, another entry in the Nero Wolfe series, by Rex Stout. The spiders in question are not Spiders from Mars, but rather, an unusual pair of earrings worn by a woman in a car who asks a squeegee urchin to call the police. Hilarity (and, of course, murder) ensues.

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So this week I’m reading Jazz Funeral, by Julie Smith, a murder mystery set in New Orleans. This is book #3 in a series featuring detective Skip Langdon. Since I got it for free off the BookBub mailing list, I didn’t have the luxury of going back and starting at book #1, but so far that doesn’t seem like a big deal.

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Still reading Subpoena Colada this week, in which our hero, a frequently-drunken lawyer (is there any other kind in fiction?), is trying to salvage the wreckage of his career and that of his highest-profile client, the apparently washed-up rock star Brian Fey (or as I keep thinking of him, Bryan Ferry — who I am NOT calling washed-up, so don’t start hating), who is being taken to the cleaners by a lawsuit from his former band-mates and who is, apparently, about to become a suspect in the murder of his replacement. Sort of like if Peter Gabriel had been suspected of killing Phil Collins, I guess.

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Lately I’ve been treating the free books I’ve accumulated from the BookBub mailing list sort of like streaming Netflix movies — that is, as disposable. After a chapter or two, if they haven’t grabbed me, I’m deleting them and moving on. Actually, that’s not really what I do with Netflix movies; I’ll pretty much watch any movie through to the end, even August Rush, which I infamously panned a few years back, earning me the ire of all six people who thought it was a good film. Although we did recently press “Eject” on Across the Universe after one too many mangled Beatles songs. Fiona Apple covering “Across the Universe” for the Pleasantville soundtrack, this was not.

Watch this instead of the movie “Across the Universe”.
It’s two hours shorter and has better music.

But I digress.

Anyway, I just started reading a new free book, a crime/mystery/comic thriller called Subpoena Colada, by Mark Dawson, which sort of sounds like a title that Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard might have come up with. Hmm, am I setting my expectations too high again? Uh oh.

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In keeping with the I can’t believe I ever submitted to them theme of my last random rejection, this morning I reached into my vast file of “go away scum” letters and pulled out a rejection from The Missouri Review: